In his 20 September 2018 blog, Dr Edwin Kruys, former Vice President of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP), writes of the increasing consolidation of Australian health data and its analysis within the Federal Department of Health.

May 1st 2019 will see changes to the Australian Government’s Practice Incentive Scheme, with the abolition of practice incentives for asthma, cervical screening, diabetes, quality prescribing and aged care access. While the exact nature of the replacement is not known, the previous plan was shelved just prior to the May 2018 Budget. It envisioned an all encompassing Quality Improvement payment and this remains the most likely basis for the new system.

Recently I had a patient needing a blepharoplasty and tarsorrhaphy, however finding an eye surgeon who could offer both proved more difficult than it should.

Which urologist does public work? Does a psychologist work with someone under 18 years of age? Do they do EMDR or work with eating disorders? Have they closed their books? Which general surgeon does that operation?

GPReferral.com was born from the frustrations and difficulties of the referral process like these. The program is a secure online Rolodex-ike database designed to provide general practitioners with the ability to search for specialist and allied health professionals.

The ‘high priest of LSD’, Dr Timothy Leary casts a long shadow over this exhaustive study of mind altering compounds despite being dismissed early on as a washed-up psychologist who had less influence over the potential value of psychedelics than he claimed.

The Berkley, California based academic was by no means the first to realise the effects of ‘acid’. That was down to the chemist Albert Hoffmann who, in 1938, thirty years before Leary et al discovered tripping, inadvertently absorbed LSD-25 in his lab and after lying down on a couch in his home reported perceiving “an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.”

There are many surprises in this expose of how IT health company Theranos conned billions from American investors and put countless patient lives at risk by claiming to have invented a miniaturised, multi-test blood analysis technology. How could so many large investors, along with retail customers such as Walgreens and Safeway, have flocked to support a company whose testing was so minimal, and whose products simply didn’t work?

The secret, if such it is, lies in the charisma of the company’s founder Elizabeth Holmes, exceptionally bright and self confident, socially well-connected and ruthlessly ambitious. In the over-heated atmosphere of Silicon Valley start-ups, she was hailed, not least by herself, as the female Steve Jobs, playing the part to the hilt, wearing black outfits and seeking to model her ‘miracle’ devices on the iPhone.

Mental health concerns continue to be the main reason for GP presentations, with 62% of patients seeking help for issues such as depression, mood disorders and anxiety. The next commonest concern is respiratory illness, which requires GP care for 45% of patients (these two combined categories total more than 100%, and much more when other issues are included, indicating the high level of patient co-morbidity).

On Thursday 30 August 2018, a fortnight before returning to Canberra to take up his new cross-bench seat in the Parliament, the Nationals’ MP for Page Kevin Hogan officially opened the University Centre for Rural Health’s 30-bed student accommodation building in Lismore.

In tune with the government’s “jobs and growth” refrain, the construction and fit-out of the building was undertaken by local builders and contractors. The accommodation, off Uralba Street in what has become the Lismore health precinct, includes multiple accessible rooms, high-speed internet access and environmentally friendly features such as water recycling and solar hot water.

The building was funded by the University of Sydney to assist in accommodating the growing number of students supported by UCRH as part of the Commonwealth Government Rural Health Multidisciplinary Training program.

Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, was first performed in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913. It broke with many of the established musical traditions and challenged the perceptions of the traditional supporters of the ballet while being enthusiastically embraced by the avant-garde.

During the opening night’s performance arguments developed between the two groups. Forty members of the audience were ejected in the fracas and one member of the orchestra reported, “Everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on”.

The advent of the Spring season sees a new beginning for the North Coast Primary Health Network. In August Julie Sturgess took over the role of Chief Executive from interim CE, Sharyn White, following the departure of Dr Vahid Saberi. Julie has had extensive experience in corporate roles in eHealth, Aboriginal health services and community care. Prior to to joining the NCPHN she was the CE of Northern Australia Primary Health Limited (NAPHL) that delivered primary health care to the people of northern Queensland through contractual arrangements with the Northern Queensland PHN. On page 5 Robin Osborne reports on the challenges Julie faces as she takes the helm at the NCPHN.